May 2019 Summaries

The blog post discusses a recent webcast featuring Nate Watts from SaltStack, which highlighted the increased productivity SaltStack experienced after implementing Cypress. The webcast, accessible via Zoom and YouTube, received numerous insightful questions from attendees and was complemented by valuable feedback gathered through a post-webcast survey. The Cypress Team appreciates the engagement and feedback from viewers, hinting at a special surprise for those who participated in the survey. They also encourage viewers to stay connected for upcoming broadcasts aimed at beginners, with more events to be announced, suggesting followers use Twitter for updates.

The webcast "Cypress in a Nutshell," originally scheduled for June 4th, has been rescheduled to June 11th and will feature Amir Rustamzadeh, a Senior Engineer at Cypress, who will demonstrate the advantages of using Cypress for web application testing. This event aims to address common challenges testers face with flaky and hard-to-write tests by showcasing Cypress's unique architecture, which promises fast and reliable testing. Participants will be guided through the Cypress Test Runner Desktop app and CLI, learn how to set up Cypress for projects, and receive an overview of its JavaScript API. The session, which includes live Q&A, is designed to boost productivity and make web app testing an enjoyable experience, with the broadcast also available on the Cypress YouTube channel.

Cypress 3.3.0 achieved a substantial 300% increase in network speed by addressing performance issues with its HTTP proxy, which initially caused significant slowness compared to standard browsers. The Cypress proxy plays a crucial role in testing by intercepting and modifying HTTP requests, but it initially introduced a delay in the time-to-first-byte (TTFB) due to the Nagle algorithm, which buffered data unnecessarily. By disabling this algorithm, Cypress improved TTFB and overall performance to near parity with a regular browser. Additionally, version 3.3.0 introduced enhancements like corporate proxy support, improved network error handling, and laid groundwork for future capabilities such as full network stubbing and HTTP/2 support. These changes not only optimized test execution speed but also enhanced the reliability and flexibility of network interactions in testing environments.

Jason Warner, the SVP of Technology at GitHub, has joined the Board of Directors at Cypress.io as their first independent board member, bringing extensive experience in creating developer tools and services. With a background in leading engineering and security at GitHub, which is the largest software development platform globally, Warner brings valuable insights into aligning the needs of developers, the open source community, and businesses. His previous leadership roles at Heroku and Canonical have equipped him with a deep understanding of delivering high-quality user experiences, a crucial aspect in application development. Warner expresses enthusiasm for Cypress.io's vision of empowering developers with tools that enable them to build products more efficiently and confidently, highlighting the challenges organizations face in keeping up with the rapidly evolving web. His addition to the Cypress.io board marks an exciting new phase in the company's growth trajectory.

Adam Gross, the former CEO of Heroku, has joined Cypress.io as an investor and the first independent Board advisor, bringing his extensive experience in developer tools and enterprise platform transformation to the company. Gross, who has a background that includes co-founding CloudConnect and holding leadership roles at Dropbox and Salesforce.com, is recognized for his contributions to various technology companies such as Pantheon, Docker, and Mattermost. In his statement, Gross emphasized the significance of JavaScript's growing influence and the challenges it presents, noting that Cypress.io offers solutions to help organizations navigate these complexities and enhance their success with JavaScript.

SaltStack, renowned for its intelligent IT automation software, faced challenges with long testing cycles and potential bugs due to rapid feature development and manual testing. To address these issues, the company adopted Cypress, significantly reducing regressions by over 90% and enabling a single QA engineer to author 300 automated tests within a month. Eventually, SaltStack achieved 100% coverage of new features with over 1,200 tests. A webcast scheduled for May 22nd will delve into how SaltStack's engineering and QA teams strengthened their collaboration to tackle these challenges, featuring technical demonstrations of their testing strategies, including the migration from React to Angular. The event will offer live Q&A, with a recording available for those unable to attend live.

The process of setting up Cypress tests in a TypeScript environment using Create React App v3 is outlined in this guide, which begins with creating a new TypeScript project and integrating Cypress for end-to-end testing. It involves installing necessary dependencies like Cypress and a utility package (@bahmutov/add-typescript-to-cypress) to enable TypeScript support. The setup requires some configuration adjustments, such as modifying the TypeScript settings to allow code emission, which is essential for running tests successfully. Potential issues with dependency conflicts, such as those involving babel-loader versions, are addressed by updating the .env file to bypass preflight checks. The article provides a sample test to verify the setup and emphasizes the use of modern IDEs like VSCode for enhanced code completion. The complete source code and further resources on using TypeScript with Cypress are available in the bahmutov/cra-cypress GitHub repository.

Gleb Bahmutov's blog post explains how to efficiently run Cypress tests in a Docker environment, particularly useful for developers who face challenges using npm directly, such as those working in Python or Go. The post introduces the cypress/included Docker image, which comes with Cypress pre-installed, allowing users to run tests without additional setup. The blog details how to run headless tests using Docker commands and how to configure the container to record test runs or change settings using environment variables. It also covers how to use Docker Compose to manage both the application and the Cypress tests and offers guidance on running the interactive Cypress Test Runner by forwarding X11 messages to the host machine. The post concludes by addressing common scenarios like running the test runner inside a Docker container while the application runs on the host, offering practical solutions and encouraging feedback from users to enhance the process.